AllThingsD » Almost Famous

Intern Becomes Real Live Blog Dude–ATD Hires Drake Martinet

Kara Swisher — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 18:29:51 +0000

It is always nice when an intern makes good, and that is entirely the case with Drake Martinet (pictured here), who joins All Things Digital–as of yesterday, in fact.

We could not be happier. Plus, we knew he was our kind of geek after he agreed to spend the night in a tent next to Robert Scoble, to cover last year’s Apple iPad release.

That was when Drake was an ATD intern, until he headed to the New York Times this past summer to work on social media efforts in the newsroom.

And that’s one of the many things he will be working on here, making ATD more Facebook-worthy, Twittified and YouTubed within an inch of our lives.

Drake will also be working on upgrading our multimedia efforts–which is to say, figuring out a more sophisticated strategy for us than BoomTown’s Flip video camera assaults, helping mesh up business development efforts with our editorial integrity, analyzing our analytics and even making sure our new interns are up to snuff.

And, for his next trick, he will also be doing posts on interesting early start-ups and emerging ideas, much in the same way he did a bang-up job with a feature called “Almost Famous” when he was an intern.

Whew! Then again, he is young!

Still, Drake has done a lot so far.

After receiving his masters degree from Stanford University’s graduate program in journalism this year, and spending time in the school’s design program (the d.school), Drake moved to Brooklyn to work for the Times.

In addition to his weekly start-up column for ATD, his written, photographic and video work has appeared in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle and numerous Web sites and blogs.

A native of San Diego, Drake first moved to Northern California to attend the University of California at Davis. He has lived in the greater Bay Area for the last eight years, excepting short stays in Louisiana, Washington D.C., New York and Chile.

When not working on a story or doing a little Web development, Drake can be found at his workbench building all manner of things physical and electronic, like the solar-powered Timbuk2 backpack that accompanies him almost everywhere.

He also loves to twist through the Peninsula hills on his classic Triumph motorcycle. (And, now that he is our employee again, perhaps we’ll make him do it with Scoble in tow.)

Drake joins a spate of recent hires at ATD, including: Liz Gannes on social (now appearing here in her new blog, NetworkEffect); Tricia Duryee on e-commerce; Ina Fried on mobile; and, last but not least, Arik Hesseldahl on enterprise.

And, as usual, much more to come….

Almost Famous: Ben Zotto of Cocoa Box Design

Drake Martinet — Fri, 28 May 2010 19:05:56 +0000

This week, we coffee’d at Coupa Cafe on the Stanford University campus to interview Ben Zotto. He’s the mind behind Cocoa Box Design, the app company responsible for Penultimate, a sleeper hit at the iPad App Store.

Who: Ben Zotto, lead everything (it’s a one-man shop).

Ben was at Microsoft and worked for Xoopit, the email-enhancement start-up acquired by Yahoo (YHOO).

What: Ben’s Penultimate brings a Moleskine notebook-style user interface to the iPad. He just released an update that allows you to rest your palm on the screen while writing, the same way you might with a pad and paper.

Why: It has been in the top tier of the Apple (AAPL) App Store for weeks.

Where: cocoabox.com (Web site); @cocoabox (Twitter); San Francisco (analog place)

Who Else: Apps like PaperDesk and Idea Boards use the pen-and-surface interface. Penultimate does drawing a little differently, though. Ben says it’s about the ink.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Worst Job: I’ve been pretty privileged. I was a short-term photocopy runner for the Junior World Ice Hockey Championships in Geneva when I was in my teens. It wasn’t bad, but I don’t suppose it played to all of my strengths.

School Days: I grew up in Boston, but we moved to Switzerland during my high school days. I left eighth grade in Massachusetts, maybe never before having left the state. And within a month of arriving in Geneva, we were on a history class trip to Florence. It was awesome.

Geek Crush: There are a lot of guys from my Microsoft (MSFT) days who are my programming heroes. Guys like Tracy Sharpe and Dinarte Morais. I’m also a big fan of Wil Shipley.

It’s something about his combination of making beautiful and functional software and being fiercely independent–you know, a coffee shop denizen–that I’m attracted to. I actually found the designer I worked with on Penultimate through him.

Gadget Freak: I don’t carry a lot of gadgets. I am pretty picky about my work set-up, though. I use an Apple extended keyboard from the 1980s with the heavy-duty key switches that I rescued off eBay (EBAY) and the Microsoft optical IntelliMouse, which is, for my money, the best mouse developed so far.

Early Internet Memory: Right after I moved to Switzerland, I had a friend back in Boston who would email me. It was probably 1992, so it wasn’t really email. He found some dial-up number at MIT that had an open gateway.

It wasn’t obvious then how you would send an email to an internal address where my dad worked. It was one of those early u-u gateway/bang-this/bang-that things. He finally figured out how to get it to work, and my dad’s secretary would print out these letters from my friend Micah back in Boston.

That was how I heard the news from Massachusetts for a little while. Micah is a recent recipient of a Ph.D in computer science from UPenn. Not a fool.

Bio in 140 Characters

Ben had an international childhood. He has worked at Microsoft, Xoopit and Yahoo. He writes software that he hopes is beautiful and useful.

The Five Questions

How long have you been developing Penultimate? Why is it a killer app when so many others don’t seem to be?

Originally, I developed an app called Handwriting for the iPhone. There was potential there, with the touchscreen, to give a personal touch to messages through handwriting that wasn’t there before. For that reason, I spent a lot of time working on the graphics math for the ink.

I wanted the input to really resemble the handwriting of the user. It turns out that getting digital ink to look real is a really subtle thing. I spent a lot of time getting it to move right, getting it to feel smooth and whatnot. I finally got it where I was happy with it.

I released the app and basically, nobody bought it.

People responded well, but I realized that anyone who used the app would only use the surface that they could see within the bounds of the iPhone screen, even though I made it so that you could scroll around easily to get a bigger surface for writing.

Size was clearly an issue.

The iPad coming out meant that all of a sudden something that was just more of a single tool like handwriting could be scaled up into an app with real uses, and all it took was more screen real estate.

Steve Jobs, in his iPad release presentation, said that if they’d added a stylus, they’d have gotten it wrong. Does the success of your app fly in the face of that vision?

It’s funny, I’d never heard that until now. I didn’t watch that speech.

When the iPad came out, I got this vision of doctors walking around making notes, and it looked like there would be lots of use cases where a keyboard just wasn’t ideal.

People would need to input info standing up, while moving and in portrait mode. From the pictures, it wasn’t clear the keyboard would be great for that.

I developed Handwriting and Penultimate to be used with your finger, and that’s how I use them most. And I think Apple has good reasons for not pushing that. They could have developed handwriting recognition, but for them, that draws away from what they are really trying to sell.

Handwriting recognition is really hard, and as soon as you do that and say you are going to do it with a finger, you have people saying, “Why doesn’t this thing recognize my handwriting better?”–instead of marveling at all the amazing things you can do with the platform.

Have you faced issues from Apple, developing a popular app that goes a little against the grain?

I’ve heard complaints about the App Store, but I’ve had a pretty good experience so far. It usually takes them about 48 hours to approve updates for my stuff. That said, there are some hardware things I’ve run into.

A big one is trying to get palm rejection in my app so that you can place your hand on the screen to write and not have it register as a touch.

On the iPad, Apple doesn’t expose those drivers to developers. On the MacBook, for instance, you can hook in the driver and get all the data–the width of the touch, rotation, everything.

All that is closed off for the iPad, so getting the natural handwriting position has been really challenging. I’m playing with that right now because it’s been one of the loudest requests.

You are embracing this use case that Apple seems to wish wasn’t there. What other requests are you getting from users who want to be able to write on their iPads?

I think form-filling is a big one. There are apps that do that, but their ink technology isn’t as good as mine, which is why I think I get those requests even though there are other apps in the field.

I got this great email from the head of a police department, who said that out in the field there are all these forms he has to fill, and he wants to take them with him and not have to bring paper.

There are all kinds. I got mail from a roofing contractor who wants to be able to snap his drawn lines to a grid to draw quick plans.

I’ve got friends who are doctors who think it’s a great idea, but say they could never use it because of HIPAA.

There seems to really be a lot of uses for being able to write by hand and make notes in this very natural way.

You worked in regular software before you did this. What is fundamentally different about developing for this platform? What are people missing about that?

I think a big difference today is that people expect updates much faster than before. It’s fundamentally different than shrink-wrapped software world, where you would spend lots of time making and refining a product, packaging it and shipping it out.

Today, people expect to see some kind of update or fix every couple of weeks and they expect them to be free. If you don’t issue an update for a while, people might begin to think you are dead.

Because the mobile platform apps are these single-use things, there is a perception that they are smaller or more simple and that therefore there is an entitlement to future updates. It’s great for users but really hard for developers.

There’s this ever-present question: “How much software is ‘three dollars worth’?”

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: Jonathan Tepper of Demotix

Drake Martinet — Fri, 07 May 2010 11:05:05 +0000

Never heard of Demotix? Don’t feel bad as that’s pretty typical, although the journalism start-up does operate in nearly every country in the world. We recently caught up with the nouveau photo wire service’s co-founder, Jonathan Tepper, to get the whole story on remaking media (and paying for it).

Who: Jonathan Tepper

What: COO, co-founder

Why: Jonathan left the finance sector to start what he calls a “street newswire.” Demotix continues to grow as competitors like Associated Press and Getty Images face harder times. Maybe he’s on to something.

Where: Demotix.com (Web site); @demotix (Twitter); London (analog place)

Who Else: AP, Reuters, and Getty Images, to name a few.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Worst Job: The hands-down worst was as a waiter at a Mexican restaurant in college. They pretty much hired me as a go-between for the pretty waitresses and the kitchen staff, who only spoke Spanish. A close second was when I spent a year making PowerPoints for Lehman Brothers after I graduated.

Not Your Typical Home Life: I grew up in Spain, where my parents ran one of the first drug rehab centers in that country. My best friends growing up were HIV-positive ex-criminals who were in our work programs.

Newshound: I probably read 70 to 80 economic blogs a day. I use Google Reader; you have to. I also read probably 10 or so papers. Mostly the European press. It all takes me about an hour.

Inspirations: Probably my father. He created an international drug rehab center from scratch. That’s a real entrepreneur.

Uber Geekery: I’ve been reading lots of Pascal recently. Something about being restless while being alone in a room with one’s self resonates with me.

Bio in 140 Characters

He repatriated to the United States from Spain for school at UNC Chapel Hill and then received a Rhodes Scholarship. He left finance to fix the news.

The Five Questions

So you and your co-founder, Turi Munthe, decided 2007 would be a good time to get into journalism. What were you thinking?

Well, for us it was really about free speech. User-generated news is one way to do that. We are both very committed to that around the world. Turi said he had an idea; I asked if he needed a partner. We raised about a million dollars from friends and family and got it started.

The idea was to build a street newswire, one where amateur and semi-professional content could come together and the people who produce it could benefit from it. The vast majority of our outreach has been Turi traveling and meeting people. Today, we have around 14,000 contributors, 3,000 of whom I’d characterize as “active.”

Is this just another journalism business that works because it doesn’t pay contributors a living wage?

I know what you mean. Our model is different because it assumes the contributor is an amateur. That said, we do the work of promoting the images to outlets and we split the fees 50/50. Many of our contributors also live in places where the economics are different, so what would not be a living wage for you and me could be a life-changing amount of money for them. The economics are pretty interesting.

What does the process look like?

Well, of our 3,000 active contributors, I’d say we have about 200 worldwide who are what you might call “staff,” in that they contribute every day. A typical submission is 12 to 14 images. We intake them though our Web site, and then there is an editorial process where we decide what they are, if they are authentic, good, useful, etc. Turnaround time is usually 15 to 30 minutes, but can be as long as an hour. Then, they go up on the site. Once they are up, we reach out to news outlets who might want to run them.

One of the things that makes us really different is our ability to operate places that other wire services can’t. Our reporters are locals, and so when a government kicks all the AP people out, we still get images.

We just rolled out a new Web site and have started dealing in video as well, so we are looking forward to the changes those bring.

At the end of the year though, you are trying to turn a profit. Has that happened yet?

No. We’ve already done another round of funding. Mostly back to friends and family. I anticipate we will be cash-flow-positive in the next 12 to 18 months, maximum.

The whole venture capital industry seems really weird to me. To be profitable, they have to put $100 to $200 million to work, and they want to sell things for 10 times the money and have minimum size of investment, which doesn’t really make sense for us. So the angel, friends and family sort of thing makes more sense at our scale.

Has locating away from the Silicon Valley venture hub been a help or a hindrance?

I think we get a lot less press and recognition because of it. There’s a community journalism funding start-up, Spot.us, that gets just a ton of coverage. I don’t want to make it appear as though I’m dissing him in any way. He does great work, but I think Spot.us funded like 50 stories last year, and we do that in a day, and he gets a ton of coverage. I suspect it’s because he’s located in San Francisco. Not that he doesn’t deserve it, but it speaks to the coverage biases.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: Kent Lindstrom of PlacePop

Drake Martinet — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:41:42 +0000

This week, we stopped by Ooga Labs, a little incubator on Market Street in San Francisco, to meet Kent Lindstrom, CEO of PlacePop. PlacePop is an Apple (AAPL) iPhone app and Web site, advertised as a check-in sharing service like Foursquare, but without the game. Hmm… a start-up that’s touting that it does LESS? We had to see about this.

Who: Kent Lindstrom

What: CEO

Why: Kent held various roles at Friendster, including president, after moving to the tech sector from a management position at Deloitte & Touche.

Where: placepop.com (Web site); @kentlind (Twitter); San Francisco (analog place)

Who Else: Foursquare and Gowalla are the big location fish right now, but a move from Facebook or Twitter could change the game at any moment.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Worst Job: I was a busboy for one day, at this French place in La Jolla, California. I just couldn’t do it and my employer agreed.

Beach Bum: I ended up lifeguarding in La Jolla during high school. It’s not a bad job, but it’s a lot more boring than people think.

Geek Crush: Jeff Bezos of Amazon (AMZN). I really try to live by his regret avoidance principle. Basically, try to look forward and see what you would regret not doing, then just do that now.

Family Affair: I take after my mother’s father. He was an entrepreneur. He ran a cigar store in Muscatine, Iowa. And he just had it going on. Much more than my other grandfather, who worked at the phone company and was miserable.

Moment of Geek Spark: In the late 1990s, this guy who was PhD student at Stanford University showed me the really early Web. It wasn’t the Web yet. You could log into the computer at the University of Michigan from here in San Francisco. At that time, you had a very physical sense of, “Holy crap, I’m inside the library in Michigan, but I’m here in San Francisco. Now, you are jacked into Facebook and have no idea where that thing is.

Bio in 140 Characters

Kent lounged on the beaches of La Jolla before a BA and MBA at Northwestern. Then to Deloitte, Friendster and finally to PlacePop today.

The Five Questions

So, PlacePop is a location-based check-in app, but no game? Are you the Grinch?

You’ve got it. We are a location-based check-in app that enables sharing. You can share your location via Twitter or Facebook, as well as sharing photos and earning points.

Wait, so there are points, but no game?

Yeah, so, think of it like a frequent-flier program. You accumulate points, or, in our case, bronze, silver, gold or platinum status at a given location. We’ve only just released the app, but we’ve been in talks with various national brands, say, Tully’s Coffee, to start offering incentives for achieving specific status at a location.

The idea is that once we reach scale, we’ll be able to go to a business and say, “Hey, we have 2,500 people who are gold members that want a $3 off on their coffee.” We’ve got a Web site that allows a user who has gone to a place, say, 10 times and has silver status to say that they want a free drink. If you then get 250 people who have the same status to click that they like that specific idea, then one of our business development people can go to the restaurant and cut a deal.

We want to build this affinity program for every place in the world.

There is a sense around location-based services that they have huge potential, if only it could be realized. What is it? What are we waiting for?

Ever since I was at Friendster, I felt that associating people with a place was powerful. I think what we are seeing is a convergence of the location-based services and recommendations. I sort of see Yelp right now as sort of like Yahoo (YHOO) in Web 1.0–very good curation of recommendations.

At some point there will be this critical mass of location data, right? And then someone will come along and be a Google (GOOG). Instead of asking people what they think, and doing this very hard process of curation, we will be able to analyze the data about behaviors and do something altogether more powerful with it.

When you make the shift from reviewing and writing about things to observing what people actually do, you have the most substantial recommendation database of places that has ever existed. That transition hasn’t happened, but is about to.

What learnings from your Friendster experience should be shared with the Foursquare of the world?

I’d say first, don’t declare the game over. When Friendster came out, people were saying that this was it, and there was no more. It was over when MySpace came out. It was over when Tribe was gonna nail the local thing. You just have to stay at it.

The other thing is, be careful about being too much of a gimmick, rather than just a value proposition. You had the whole tagged thing with MySpace, where they were trying to use game dynamics to motivate behavior. Then you had Facebook come along and took all that out. There was no thing like, “Hey, get 50 friends and get the super-friendly Zuckerbadge.” Nothing like that. They just stuck to the value proposition.

Everyone was watching Facebook this week for a big location announcement. How are you guys planning to adjust?

We’ve had a Facebook app in development for a while. I think we’ll probably be releasing it this week. I think the lack of announcement from Facebook is an indication that they are going to do something, but that they are having an internal debate on exactly how.

It probably centers around the following: They are trying to figure out whether to do latitude and longitude, or whether they want to put in the places themselves. Once they’ve figured out that they want to do places, they need to decide if they want to do curated places–do they want to do, “Cornell: or just leave it to fan pages. Once they do that, they need to decide how much of their mobile app to devote to it. They are probably trying to figure out what that looks like.

Once that’s all figured out, they have to decide if they want to put it all in the API and let us use it to make a killer recommendation engine, or a dating engine to figure out who you are most compatible with.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: David Maher Roberts of The Filter

Drake Martinet — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 03:56:38 +0000

This week, we interviewed David Maher Roberts, CEO of The Filter. The Filter has been around for awhile, but has been reinvented as a service for content companies. It takes what David describes as some pretty high-caliber math and marries it to user data to spit out things users want to see and hear.

Who: David Maher Roberts

What: CEO

Why: David came to The Filter from the publishing world. The Filter used to be a music-selection engine (pre-Apple Genius). Today, after a major overhaul, David says it’s trying to be a recommendation engine that brings “the world of entertainment, filtered for me.” Now The Filter offers that service to businesses that want a recommendation engine on top of their own content services. NBC is the company’s latest major client.

Where: thefilter.com (Web site); @davidpmr (Twitter); Bath, United Kingdom (analog place)

Who Else: Apple’s (AAPL) Genius is trying to supply the service on top of its own content engine in iTunes. Pandora is in the mix too.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Man of the World: I don’t know where my accent is from. I’m half French and half English and was raised in international schools in Brussels. I’m a true European.

Started Life: I went into journalism as a photographer. When I was 24, I started a couple of magazines, which didn’t go well, but I got picked up by a U.K.-based publisher (Future Publishing) and moved up their ranks.

Biggest Influence: Chris Anderson, founder of Future Media (David’s former employer) and now of TED.

Real Passion: I was trained as a jazz drummer from the age of 10 and always played in bands and things.

On His Playlist: All based around French Electro Pop. Right now, I’ve fallen in love with Owl City. It represents exactly the sort of music I grew up with in France. It just makes me smile. My staple diet is much more British. Stuff like the Twang. My favorite band of all time is Belle and Sebastian.

Bio in 140 Characters

Lives in Bath, U.K., but began life a citizen of Europe. David commutes globally so his family doesn’t have to.

The Five Questions

Break this down for me. What does The Filter do now, and why is Peter Gabriel involved?

Yeah, so Peter Gabriel was one of our founders and is an investor now. He and our CTO, Martin Hopkins, had the idea about 10 years ago that we would need some kind of tool to help us navigate the world of content when we had too much choice. Our model has changed since then, but we still do basically the same thing. Today, we are basically in the SaaS, software-as-a-service, business. Our technology gets laid on top of other businesses’ content to deliver more relevant recommendations.

A good example is Nokia (NOK). They use us to combine information about your content preferences and your geolocation to give you recommendations about events nearby.

Let’s say I’m listening to music online. How much information about me does my music service need to give you in order for this to work?

Well, what we offer to most of our customers is an anonymous service. We do a lot of personalized services too, though. We can do a good job not knowing anything about the person and just about the session they are in right now. We take input like the piece of music, how many times you’ve listened, whether or not you’ve shared it or saved it to a play list, and then recommend statistically similar content. At its core, our product is a Bayesian inference engine, so it assigns mathematical probabilities to whether or not you will like something and then computes the best fit. We blend the metadata connections with the behavioral connections, and then we filter the output.

I’m a little hazy on how you connect consumers to their data and then make recommendations. You said you do use individual-level data sometimes. Do you guys use data collected from one company to inform the algorithm that recommends content at another?

Well, there are two things we are being careful about, as you’d imagine. Generally, we use data from within an organization to inform the decisions made there. We do anonymize and aggregate all of the data and use that for all of our customers. The individual-level data we try to keep anonymous.

What does a paper publishing guy have to offer a digital recommendation engine?

I came in originally as a consultant to help them with their “come to market” strategy. I was running all of Future Publishing’s Web operations for Europe and stumbled upon Eden Ventures, who are the VCs behind The Filter. I came in, and there was already a CEO. I didn’t realize they were trying to replace him, but we worked on what they should be doing and at the end of it they offered me the job. I would say that I come in from the content and publishing world, and I know how media companies make the kinds of decisions like using a service like The Filter.

What is the eventuality you guys hope for here? Is success in ubiquity or in being bought up?

I think my goal with The Filter is to grow it to be so large that it is the glue that connects people to their content. Once that happens, I think we’d hope for a large business to be so connected to our technology that they want to own it.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: Chris Messina of Google

Drake Martinet — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 20:09:08 +0000

In a feature of “Almost Famous” we’ve dubbed “Need to Know,” All Things Digital talks with top players inside tech companies–much as we talk to emerging and innovative entrepreneurs–who are perhaps not as prominent as their influence suggests, but who should be.

This week: We took a trip to a little company called Google (GOOG) to talk with Chris Messina, Google’s open Web advocate. Openness? Google? We couldn’t pass this up.

Who: Chris Messina

What: Open Web advocate

Why: Chris has been in early on all kinds of pioneering open Web projects. He helped run Spread Firefox–Mozilla’s community marketing effort–co-founded the BarCamp user-generated un-conferences, and single-handedly invented the Twitter hashtag: #. No joke. He just made the move to the search giant.

Where: Factory Joe (blog); @chrismessina (Twitter); Googleplex (analog place)

Who Else: Open standards are Messina’s forte, but he’s been preaching the gospel of openness to many Google teams.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Worst Job: You know, I’ve led a pretty padded life, but I guess my worst one was when I was a janitor in a print shop while living in Switzerland. I was living in an attic in this tiny town to attend this Swiss design school–which I didn’t like at all–and this is how I made my meager living while there.

Has a Geek Crush on: I first started learning Web design by reading Jeffrey Zeldman’s book. There are lots, though. More related to the stuff I’m doing now, I think John Panzer is a big unsung hero, he’s the one pushing the Salmon stuff (Google’s open comment project) forward.

Gadget of the Moment: I still love my first-generation Apple (AAPL) iPhone. It doesn’t have 3G and it’s slow as molasses, but I really like the form factor, the metallic finish, everything. It also allows you to take screenshots, which is the one thing really missing from Android.

Biggest Difference Being at Google: Even more email, if you can believe it.

Design Geekiness: My favorite font ever is Pennsylvania by Christian Schwartz. I also like Bello, Flama and Tungsten.

Bio in 140 Characters

Born in New Hampshire, he trained as a communication designer at Carnegie Mellon. He left for California and has been into the open Web ever since.

The Five Questions

What does being an open Web advocate at Google mean? Does it feel like you are working for “The Man”?

Generally what I’m doing here is a lot like what I used to do, actually. I have contact with a lot of different developer teams, and I talk to them about how they can use open standards in their work. Right now though, mostly I’m working on Google Buzz, doing developer relations and helping design the Buzz APIs. We’re trying to create these technologies based on stuff from the grassroots communities where these things already exist, as opposed to inventing our own standards. We document everything on the Google code site and then we just talk about it. It’s a little bit of an evangelism role, in the sense that we have to go out and be a part of the community and be a router for information back into Google.

Big companies seem to have their own agendas and needs to be met, and what I’m realizing now is that a lot of times, they also don’t have time or a way to go out and find the places where these needs are and these tools are already being developed. There are a lot of people who are really hungry for this information, but maybe just didn’t know where to go.

So how do you see Google Buzz as a part of the social Web landscape, now that you’ve been on the inside?

We approached it from a “pieces that are loosely joined” perspective so that we can spit out smaller communities that are self-sufficient, rather than one big monolithic project like Facebook Connect. We built Buzz so that Google can be one place that hosts the underlying technologies, but the capabilities can be spread and used by anyone who wants that social functionality.

The goal is to create a much larger social Web that is dispersed, as opposed to another monolithic silo that sort of sucks in a lot of activity and doesn’t let anything out. Facebook is just the most recent silo, there have been lots in the past. AOL (AOL). Prodigy. A lot of times they don’t mean to be that, but it just happens.

How do you see the competing philosophies of openness and proprietary technology and information at play on the social Web?

I think the way that I look at it is that facilitating choice is actually a good way to ensure you remain competitive. Also, right now, the social Web is in such infancy that competing on what is available now seems so premature. I’d rather see us spend the next five or 10 years building out the social Web so that we have good standards for identity, good standards for authentication and open ways to bring your friends with you to any site on the Web.

Because we’ve never had this social data before, there’s this mentality that it’s solid gold, and we should be hoarding it keeping it from everyone and only letting out little bits. In reality, I think markets work best when there is a flow of data. If I can’t take my data out of one network and move it into another, like I can move credit card balances from one to the other, then I think we are inhibiting the types of things we should be building, which will be much richer.

I already sign into 10 Google products a day with the same account. Is my Google account going to become more like Facebook Connect?

Well, the technology is there, but it’s more a question of motivation. It’s actually a problem I’ve been working on for the last two or three years. The first question is, how do you provide choice to people when they want to log in (what do you ask for)? The other question is, why would they use any one service or other, given the choice?

Facebook has solved that problem by just eliminating the choice. You just choose Facebook Connect, click a button, and it will be fine. And it works pretty well.

A barrier for us is that our tools are built on standards like openID and OAuth that were designed by people who cared a lot more about privacy. As a result of that, a technology based on openID doesn’t automatically come with all the social data that make modern applications work. We are actually working with Facebook on this problem, because it turns out the hardest thing to figure out is just what to put on the user interface–how do you quickly ask people what they’d like to share? We want to avoid making Web sites look like the side of a Nascar.

Google’s push into mobile is based on open standards. How do you see that proliferating??

You know, even the iPhone is actually just a platform that interacts with a bunch of open standards and accepted systems. It relies on 3G, sends email, SMS, takes pictures that are compressed and connects to other devices via Bluetooth–they are all open standards and protocols that have enabled these great tools. I think people are going to want more. I’m intrigued by Android, and it, plus the devices it runs on, are really getting there.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: Lance Podell of Next New Networks

Drake Martinet — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:30:31 +0000

A feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We grabbed a Caltrain up to San Francisco to meet with Lance Podell, CEO of Next New Networks, the Web video network whose shows usually mix hi-fi production and lo-fi hosts for that ultra-Webby feel that the kids are raving about.

Or so Podell hopes.

Who: Lance Podell

What: Chief Executive Officer

Why: According to Lance, Next New Networks is aiming to transform its existing lineup of 12 Web TV “networks” into a content behemoth that competes with the big cable guys. Oh yeah, and they plan to monetize it too. Eye rolling aside, at the end of 2009, they were nearly profitable.

Where: nextnewnetworks.com (Web site); @NextNewNetworks (Twitter); New York, N.Y. (analog place)

Who else: You name it. Next New Networks competes for face time with an armada of YouTube stars (although they try to recruit some of them too). How does it stack up? Well, the camera work in the latest webisode from YouTube star Fred isn’t anything to write home about, but you don’t have to sit through video advertising either.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job Ever: I had a job for a very brief time at a start-up called Savatar; it’s hard to even think about it. [Ad giant] WPP (WPPGY) had invested in this company that was supposed to build Web sites for all the WPP companies. This is like back in 1994. Not only did it crash and burn, but they made me go into I don’t know how many meetings and promise things I just knew we could never deliver.

When He’s Not Busy CEOing: I’m a dad a lot. My son plays just about every sport, so I’m at a lot of games. I also enjoy chasing my little girls around the house.

Gadget of the Moment: I’d love to buy an Internet-enabled TV. I was in the early days of interactive television trials and I really want to see that come to fruition.

Wishes There Was an App For: I really want to be able to use my BlackBerry with my Mac.

Fails At: Ugh, it’s a long list. My son would say understanding that he’s always right.

Bio in 140 Characters

Lance went from Lafayette College to the HBS, and then into the ad game. Next New Networks brought him in to be the ad money rainmaker.

The Five Questions

You guys have been around for a while now. I don’t know if I’d call you “New,” but what’s “Next” for you ?

We don’t just believe in just creating shows and niche content. We believe that the hosts of our shows have to also be a member of the community the show is aimed at. On our indy mogul network for example, Eric Beck literally runs one of the shows, Backyard FX [Think McG meets MythBusters]. He creates Hollywood-style special effects in your backyard for under $100. He’s really doing it. That’s step one.

Step two is we are asking you to contribute. It’s very Web-like, in a very Web way, right? Not like TV. We want you to contribute your thoughts, videos, comments and posts, following the video. Again, not like TV. We don’t have six-month development cycles. Every week that host is coming up with the next episode and we are relating it back to the community and their experience in the prior week.

So, the model is: No more broadcast, just piece together enough niche content, plus some revenue model, to equal profitability?

That’s true, what you said is entirely true. But I don’t want to get too bogged down in that. And the end of the day though, we are an entertainment company, so niches can mean a variety of things. Early on, the company’s goal was to have 100 “networks.” I think that was just an audacious goal to set for the sake of goal-setting. What we’ve done over time is try lots of things, see what works and what doesn’t, see where the passion within our company is, and build on that. And, as the YouTube audience has grown and matured, we can start to look there for shows that are popular and communities of interest.

Also, advertisers are asking for a lot. They want to reach moms, for example. So we are looking for gaps in the Internet that are also things moms want to watch. We don’t create programming specifically to satisfy the advertisers.

A good example of how the relationship works is that Caress had hired Carson Kressley [the "Queer Eye" guy] as a spokesperson, and as part of the ad agreement, we had him on our women’s talk show. Now, Carson wasn’t scripted by Caress, he just came on the show. It was a women’s talk show and he acted as though he were on the “Ellen” show, for instance.

You guys put your content everywhere: YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo–all of them. Are you concerned about a platform like Hulu setting up a pay wall and potentially adding a level of complication to your viewers’ experience?

We’re not concerned yet. If Hulu were to change to paid content, I don’t know that it would start with the Web originals. Do I imagine that three years from now that Web original programming will have the same kind of brand impact as something that comes out of NBC? Yes. Because Internet TV is changing everything. Our programs can be viewed on TiVo. They can be viewed on FiOS. Once, we had the kind of loyalty that might warrant it, would I be interested in selling some content behind a wall? Yeah, I’d look at it.

So you are confident that you can turn a profit without making people pay?

You know, you are talking to an old ad guy here. We have always said we’d never be able to pay for the next thing with just advertising and yet we always have. I believe we will pay, not for everything. For some things.

So if advertising is what’s “Next,” then what will those “New” ads have to do differently?

The advertisers that do really well with us, the ones who really get it, are the ones who come to me and say they want to hear their products advertised in the voice of the show host. They want the ad to sound like the voice of that community. They don’t want me to use their eight words that are in every print ad. They don’t want me to say that they are 100 percent reliable, safe and colorfast. They want me to talk about their brand in the way that the community will connect with it.

Another area that I think is hugely compelling is in the area of interactivity. And I think fashion is just the first place it should go. The idea of watching something on TV and then being able to immediately buy what the actor is wearing is just incredible to me.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: Mehdi Maghsoodnia of BookRenter

Drake Martinet — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:35:13 +0000

A feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We took a coffee break (and made an interview and video) with Mehdi Maghsoodnia, CEO of BookRenter, a company that claims to be “numero uno” in online textbook rentals, a bone of contention between it and larger competitor Chegg.

Who: Mehdi Maghsoodnia

What: Chief Executive Officer

Why: BookRenter is in a battle with competitor Chegg. Mehdi freely admits that Chegg holds more market share, but says his model has the staying power to outlast it. Presumably, Chegg begs to differ.

Where: bookrenter.com (Web site); @bookrenter (Twitter); Campbell, Calif. (analog place)

Who else: BookRenter is in a battle for the hearts and minds of college students everywhere. On one side, it competes with college bookstores, Amazon (AMZN), and a trial-rental program from Barnes & Noble (BKS). Once a customer goes the way of rental rather than purchase, BookRenter has to fight with Chegg, the textbook service now led by longtime Silicon Valley exec Dan Rosensweig and whose eggshell has been stuffed with $144 million in venture funding.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job Ever: I used to sweep the grounds for a hotel in San Francisco, called Roberts at the Beach Motel (it’s still there). It was right next to the zoo, and the wind would blow all the dust, sand and junk into the hotel, and my job was just to sweep the floor. That was not at all fun.

Geek Crush: I’m a fanatic in terms of business models, and I track the careers of people I admire. I keep track of Maynard Webb, who used to be the COO at eBay (EBAY). I track people with clever minds and clever ideas.

Gadget of the Moment: I love my Apple (AAPL) iPhone–for the first time recently I traveled without my laptop. It was great. The app environment is fascinating. If you look on my phone, the apps are in two distinct sections. One is all the games that keep my kids busy, and the second category is functional things for me. News feeders, banking…and I watch all kinds of videos on the TED app when I’m traveling.

International Businessman of Mystery: I was born in Iran. Then, we moved to London. I traveled a lot and lived all over. I realized early on that a consequence of that is I’m culturally very unmarketable. It’s pretty impossible to market to me. Which, by definition, means I’m not the greatest marketer, because I don’t know what makes people want to buy things.

It’s All in the Family: I sit on the board of Nature Air, an airline in Costa Rica. It’s the first regional green airline, and it’s the family business.

Bio in 140 Characters

Mehdi grew up global, but landed in Silicon Valley. He spent time as a VC then moved to head CafePress. Now he’s CEO at BookRenter.

The Five Questions

Let’s get right into this. How are you guys different from Chegg?

When I was at CafePress, we were the biggest online t-shirt retailer in the world. We spent a lot of time getting shirts in from China, organizing them, putting them in bins, tracking them, printing them and so on. I observed how much of our management bandwidth and resources went into back-end fulfillment as a retailer. I came out of CafePress and was sitting on the venture side when I saw Chegg and BookRenter. I said, “These are two teams satisfying specific demands out there, but with totally different business models.”

Chegg was trying to do everything–taking on warehousing, buying the books, etc. There were many companies doing that, by the way. Amazon among them. The BookRenter team was clever, and they said, “Let’s flip this on its head.” Investing in a book as stock is a losing venture, because your individual investment on the book loses value over time. You also lose money on leasing the warehouse, forklifts, all of it.

At BookRenter, we have all kinds of partnerships that handle those logistics, including recent partnerships with school bookstores themselves. We are in a cyclical business, where maybe four months out of the year we are handling books, and, in the other eight, the books are in the students’ hands. Our costs adjust within those cycles as quickly as changes happen.

How do you track and price all the books when you don’t own them?

So, most of the business is done today on an inventory capitalization model. That is to say, you have a position on what books you have. Everyone buys books and then has to find a match for that book in a rental relationship.

BookRenter takes a very different approach. Our software system creates rental relationships in real time, which means it figures out prices and availability for every new rental. If you come to us and say you want to rent a biology book, the system turns around and queries our suppliers and decides who will be able to get us that book at the lowest overall cost. Our cost algorithm is complex and takes into account things like the reliability of the provider for meeting its commitment on that book.

Once the determination has been made, only then do we take a position on that book and add it to inventory. I can offer as many books as [Chegg] or anyone else, because I’m offering that book virtually. I only pay when I have a paying customer.

You’ve got a lot to say about how you are going to gain on Chegg. Is this really a market that is worth the fight?

Oh yes, the market is growing very fast. We saw 300 percent growth year over year in January. The textbook business is a $9-billion-a-year industry. Someday we hope that a third of that is rentals. The value proposition is there. Renting is cheaper than buying. It’s even cheaper than buying used. Eighteen months from now, we are still going to be a smaller player, but we have the longevity.

Do you do this for the competition, or is it something else that drives you?

I’ll be honest. The best possible outcome for us is that Chegg stays prosperous. Both of us are fighting the same battle in terms of converting some of the buying market to a renting market. So, we are all in the same market development boat. But what I really like about this is the process. I see our business as a 0.9 version, so there are so many things we can still work on.

Organizationally and market-wise, it’s a very exciting thing to design a system for. You have to balance the needs of all kinds of partners. It’s like playing multidimensional chess with very good players. It’s just fun. Also, the growth factor is great. If I had to solve these problems in a business that wasn’t growing, that’s not a lot of fun.

I’ve been there man, that’s deadly. You put a lot of intellectual work into it and you can’t get anyone to care.

As a current student, I’ve got to ask: How have you dealt with undoubtedly the biggest customer problem–highlighting?

[Laughs] You know, that was a real issue early on. Our early policy was no highlighting at all, of any kind. It turned out that students didn’t seem to mind [the highlighting], and in fact many liked it. It was like someone had already done the work of showing them the important parts of the book. Today, we will only charge for damage if there’s been a real issue, like, someone spilled water all over the book and really ruined it.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: Pat Hanrahan of Tableau

Drake Martinet — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:16:20 +0000

A feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We dropped by the Gates Computer Science building at Stanford University for an interview with Pat Hanrahan, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, as well as chief technology officer at Tableau, a business intelligence start-up with Ph.D level chops in data visualization.

Who: Pat Hanrahan

What: Chief Technology Officer

Why: Last Thursday, Tableau launched a public version of the data visualization product it sells to the likes of Microsoft (MSFT), eBay (EBAY) and Google (GOOG). Tableau Public is a free service aimed at journalists, bloggers and academics who want to create original, data-driven graphics similar to those from major news outlets.

Where: tableausoftware.com (Web site); @tableau (Twitter); Seattle and San Francisco (analog places)

Who else: Tableau competes directly with huge enterprise software companies like Oracle (ORCL), IBM (IBM) and SAP (SAP). Tableau Public, on the other hand, signals its entrance into a new market where the field is wide open.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job Ever: I’ve been pretty lucky. I’ve had mostly good jobs. I guess the worst was when I worked in a paper mill in college. I’d be on fire duty, which meant standing around with a hose and doing nothing. That said, if you go a week in a paper mill without a fire, you are doing well. All that dust accumulates and practically becomes explosive.

Geek Crush: Francis Crick, the molecular biologist. I got my Ph.D in biophysics, and he was one of the only physicists ever to be successful in biology. He also brought theory to biology at a time when it was unheard of, and I thought that was a really big thing. This was back in the late 1970s when it was basically impossible to be a theoretical biologist. I’m a big fan of the mixing of theory and practice. He kind of brought the two of those together.

Gadget of the Moment: You know, I’m a little bit of a gadget guy, but I’m more of a maker type. I like electronics, mechanics, chemistry–lots of things. My favorite recent project was building a cat wheel. It’s like a hamster wheel, but giant, four feet in diameter. I’ve got a Bengal cat. He’s very energetic.

Secret Fame: Pat has two technical Oscars for his founding work on the RenderMan software at Pixar.

Secret Shame: He can’t sing or dance to save his life.

Bio in 140 Characters

Pat grew up in Green Bay. Wisconsin made him a Ph.D chess champion. A self-taught programmer, now he’s a CS professor and entrepreneur.

The Five Questions

You say Tableau is in business intelligence, but what do you really do?

Well, Tableau’s center is really about answering questions with data. A lot of data visualization research is really about making pretty pictures, but we worked with psychologists and graphic designers to understand how people deal with visual data and process it. Let’s say you could answer a question by making a picture that shows the answer. If you want to know what the maximum selling product is, you make a picture where maximum stands out. If you want to know spatial distribution, you make a map. We create pictures that answer questions, but we do it for businesses that want to know things about their own metrics. It has been termed visual analysis–sort of doing a Q&A with data and images.

Who is using it well?

I’ve been really surprised by how many businesses use the sorts of metrics that work well with Tableau. We sell to category managers at eBay, for instance. Google uses us a lot for managing its data centers. We are not really vertical at all. Tableau is useful for anyone who has data.

A really interesting example is our relationship with Xbox. They record all the game play and then offer data through us to their game developers so that the developers can see what the actual game play experience is like. When are people dying? Are players spending time where the developers think they should? Stuff like that.

It is really everything. Some churches use us to keep track of who is donating what on Sundays. Most of our users are the Excel user; maybe they have data, but not a way to visualize it. It’s amazing to me how quantitative so many people are.

So how does Tableau Public differ from your enterprise product?

Well, the market we’re going after right now is individual content producers who might want to put data online. The New York Times (NYT) is often held up as an example of these good graphics, but an individual blogger doesn’t have a huge graphics department.

We offer the service for free, with some limits on number of views, and if the graphics take off, then maybe we’ve earned a paying customer. Also, on the free version, the data is public. It’s good for us because we get exposure, and it’s good for others because they get free access to the technology.

We aren’t immediately concerned about making money with Tableau Public. We already have a robust business selling to other businesses, so we sort of came to the freemium model backwards of most start-ups.

Can you guys really compete with the likes of IBM, SAP and Oracle?

Well, one big reason we get our customers is the whole visual analysis thing that is at the core of what we do. It’s unique to us. We’re also really well known for being easy to use and easy to deploy. A lot of times, what happens in enterprise software, you get these monolithic, giant systems that can be clunky and painful to add new features to. This can be true especially in the analysis arena.

The Dallas Cowboys are a good example. The sales manager there would go to his data guy and say, “I want to know how many jerseys I sold yesterday.” And they’d start giving all these technical answers about the data cube not being connected to the servers and so on. He was sold on us because he could plug in a complex spreadsheet, and we could tell him that answer in a very concrete way in a reasonable amount of time. It all goes back to having that Q&A with your data.

You are a professor of computer science and electrical engineering; you must have a pretty amazing early technology memory that turned you on to the sciences.

For me, it was just science in general, just being a nerd and a scientist. I remember when I bought my first chemistry set from a company now called Elemental Scientific. I remember that I was about eight or so, and most of the research I did was just so I would know what to buy. I saved up all my money and went to the store with my grandmother and came out with this giant box of retorts and flasks and all kinds of stuff. I had a great time the rest of the summer just doing reactions.

The other big thing with me and science was chess. I was the Wisconsin state chess champion in high school, and that is what taught me to really study things. I’ve always been more interested in ideas than technology I guess.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: Julia Hartz of Eventbrite

Drake Martinet — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:50:05 +0000

A feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We got all-access passes to Skype for an interview with Julia Hartz, co-founder and president of Eventbrite, the four-year-old Web-based ticketing service aiming to unseat the big guys.

Using the Eventbrite Web interface, organizers can set up ticket sales and publicize their events using social media tools. It’s a labor of love, too, as Julia shares the big office with co-founder and husband Kevin.

Who: Julia Hartz

What: President and co-founder

Why: Hartz said Eventbrite has cracked the code on merging business and the social graph. It enables event organizers to publish events online and sell tickets, then publish the events to Facebook. And if your event is free, so are Eventbrite services. Julia says it is democratizing the ticketing industry, but it can’t all be free. Eventbrite saw $100 million in ticket sales in 2009.

Where: eventbrite.com (Web site); @eventbrite (Twitter); San Francisco, Calif. (analog place)

Who else: Eventbrite services put it in competition with most of the ticket-selling world, especially Ticketmaster, which is now owned by Live Nation (LYV). But Hartz said most of the people using Eventbrite for the first time are switching from using spreadsheets.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in Her Facebook Profile

Worst Job Ever: I was an intern on the set of “Friends.” It was this awful experience taking place in this wondrous environment. There was a serious level of paranoia there. And basically, my job was to hold a phone and anytime it rang, I had to go find that person on the set. My second worst job was as a barista at The Ugly Mug in Santa Cruz. I would drink like three mochas and eat some pastries during my shift and then be depressed for the rest of the day.

Her Big Event of 2010: I’m really looking forward to Chirp, the upcoming Twitter conference. That and maybe F8, the Facebook conference.

Gadget of the Moment: My new iPad…just kidding. I guess just my Apple (AAPL) iPhone. We’re kind of a gadget family. Our two-year-old has a Pleo, because we can’t get a puppy in our place.

Wants to Be When She Grows Up: I want to be a great mom.

Fails At: Being a working mom and running the start-up. I feel like I’m never doing 100 percent in either. I feel 80 percent in everything. Kevin would say I fail at taking big risks–stuff like skydiving or petting a spider at the children’s museum.

Bio in 140 Characters

Hartz grew up in Santa Cruz. She went to Pepperdine for a degree in being a TV exec. She was at MTV, FX, then left for the start-up world.

The Five Questions

You started Eventbrite in 2006–why this and why then?

Well, I’ll just be honest; it had a lot to do with logistics. I’d just moved up here and Kevin and I had just gotten engaged. I was about to go to Current TV and didn’t know if that was the right move. We got to talking about all the events we heard about after the fact, and all the event “postcards” we got on our car windshields. There was little to no innovation in the events market. Unless you were using Ticketmaster, you really had no access to tools and technology that could help you as a smaller events planner. Also, Kevin was very close to PayPal, so we were looking at what we could do based on the PayPal API. The transaction is where it began.

So, you and Kevin have sort of made Eventbrite your baby. How does being a start-up couple change things?

Well, in working with somebody you know quite well, we sort of divide and conquer. We sort of have our own areas of the business that we strive to excel in, and we try to support each other. We received some really great advice early on from Michael and Xochi Birch, who co-founded Bebo. When we asked them how they worked together, they said divide and conquer–don’t work on anything together. That’s sorta what we do. And we do really well on a day-to-day basis. But if you get us behind the same spreadsheet, we’ll definitely be fighting for the mouse.

What sorts of mistakes have you guys made doing this?

I think we’ve been pretty good on avoiding most big mistakes, but I do think we’ve been too focused on making decisions around customer reactions…that sounds a little weird. Let me give you an example. So, we were a free service early on, then we were freemium. The problem was that our basic service was so robust that our premium service was only a little better. We were toying with the idea of going all paid for too long. When we finally bit the bullet and did it, we had very little decrease in use. We think it’s because event organizers don’t have to make an additional choice now about which service to use. The cost just scales with the ticket price. We just took too long to make the decision, I think.

You guys are building a pretty interesting picture of who attends what events. Are you planning to tread further into the social graph and begin recommending events to people based on past attendance?

Yes. We see that to be something that’s very exciting, but we want to do it in the right way. Hyper-relevancy is key to us, so, um, I can’t say how we’ll do it, but when we do it, we’ll definitely take into account what’s out there right now and try to innovate on that. I’d say that will happen in the broad window of the next two years.

What are your major moves going to be in 2010?

How about this? How about the fact that in five years, Eventbrite will be the only place that you will ever go to buy a ticket for any event that you would ever attend. I truly believe that, and I can actually see how we’ll get there. We are a smaller business and can move quite quickly. We don’t have a bullseye in your office with the Ticketmaster logo in the middle. We aren’t a Ticketmaster killer, but we see our model as becoming the status quo for all ticketing.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: Keith Lee of Booyah Games

Drake Martinet — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:07:30 +0000

A feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We walked down University Avenue to the Silicon Valley headquarters of Booyah Games to talk with co-founder and CEO Keith Lee. Booyah is the maker of MyTown, an Apple (AAPL) iPhone app that combines Foursquare and Monopoly into a novel kind of augmented-reality game. The start-up has added about 100,000 news users a week over the last two months.

Who: Keith Lee

What: CEO and co-founder

Why: Keith was a lead producer on Diablo III at Activision Blizzard (ATVI), but left with some colleagues to start Booyah and dip his feet into the social-gaming space. He wanted to explore ways to connect the real world to the game world. After some trial and error, he decided to build an experience around the iPhone GPS platform.

Where: Booyah.com (Web site); Search “MyTown” (iTunes); Palo Alto, Calif. (analog place)

Who else: Booyah’s MyTown competes directly with Foursquare and Gowalla as a location-based game for the iPhone.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Game of the Moment: I’ve just started playing Demon Soul, and it’s probably the hardest game I’ve played in the last five years. It’s very stats-based, so stuff like the weight of your sword or knowing how a halberd (a type of battle ax) works matters. It’s full of some real innovations for player interactions as well.

Has a Geek Crush On: Rob Pardo. He’s the creator of Starcraft, Warcraft and World of Warcraft. His philosophies have really influenced how I build games.

Gadget of the Moment: I was really disappointed in the Kindle. I got one for Christmas. I had to subscribe and pay to read TechCrunch or Kotaku. It didn’t make sense.

Best Gamer High: It is about doing the hardest thing in the game, reaching the extra goals and doing it faster than everyone. So, when people are talking about that goal or feature I can be like, “Yeah, I already got that.” I played Mass Effect twice, just to get the highest score in our group. It’s all about the bragging rights.

Fails At: I’m a total fail at a lot of things–basically everything that involves real life. I have, like, zero common sense. A perfect example is this one time I was supposed to take care of my girlfriend’s little dog. Without thinking, I set the dog down on the top of this high speaker, and I went off to do something else. Well, the dog decided to jump down and she broke her leg. When I called my girlfriend, she knew what I’d done. She just picked up the phone and said, “What did you do to the dog?” It’s all the normal-living stuff I can’t do.

Bio in 140 Characters

Globetrotted growing up. Educated at Exeter and Stanford. He went into finance at parent’s request, but his internal gamer won out.

The Five Questions

You seem like a pretty hardcore gamer. Where does that come from?

We moved around a lot when I was growing up. I was born in Hong Kong, then we moved to the Netherlands, lots of other places. My parents were very strict. I was forced to play piano and violin two hours a day. We never had any videogames; I could only play them over at friend’s houses. I wasn’t allowed to read sci-fi or fantasy books either. I was only allowed to read biographies and classics….I think because I was never allowed to read that stuff, that’s all I ended up reading when I went to Exeter and college, and why I needed to be a part of making games.

So, what makes MyTown worth playing?

From the very beginning, we wanted to get into this to forge a new category of social games. We don’t really see ourselves as being in competition with Farmville or any of the others because the games are so different, but maybe just in terms of mindshare. We want to be the leader in location-based gaming, or real-world gaming. With MyTown, we’ve created a way, by partnering with Citysearch, to let people have virtual ownership of real places. Our strategy moving forward is about widening the gap between us and our competitors in certain metrics and trying to be very agile. It’s sort of like in World of Warcraft. You can work methodically on something until someone comes and scouts you and sees what you are doing. Then, you have to build like mad so you can rush them.

What are you making that hasn’t been scouted yet?

As for future stuff, I’m pretty sure we’re going to be doing something music-related. We have a few products that are already in the works for Facebook that are a totally new type of social game. They have real-world tie-ins like MyTown. We could leverage GPS from a smartphone, but also focus on tie-ins with music, celebrities and businesses.

We’re actually 70 percent done with that, and we are pretty close to announcing. Probably early Q2. I really feel like [in this arena] there are a lot of Atari-style games, in that everyone is just cloning each other. I think we have the opportunity to be a Nintendo and bring that killer Super Mario Brothers game that changes everything.

How heavily are the personalities of the developers here affecting the products?

Yeah, I mentioned the music thing before. I don’t know it you saw when you came in, but that was my DJ equipment in the corner. I’m really into the house and electronic music scene–I fly down to Los Angeles to DJ pretty frequently. That’s a pretty direct link.

There are a lot of interesting people here. We have a developer who used to be a Buddhist monk and then became a sort of Indiana Jones figure. He has this amazing skill to think not just deeply but laterally and connect things in games that wouldn’t normally be thought of as associated with each other. That alternative way of thinking lends itself to our strength.

What was your “Living in the Future” moment in gaming, when you knew the arena had come of age?

Its hard to say. I think it was probably the first time I played an MMO [massive multiplayer online] game. It wasn’t anything like crazy “Minority Report” technology stuff. It was when I played Dark Age of Camelot and everything afterward. I actually felt like I was completely in the a community environment, like a virtual world. Before, when I went in and came back out of the game, it went with me. But now, even if I’m not there, it keeps moving. Like it was something that would evolve without me. I felt like I had to get back in there, because I wouldn’t even know what it would be like 20 days later.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: Leslie Fine of Crowdcast

Drake Martinet — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:45:04 +0000

A feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We had a Skype visit with, asked some questions of and gathered a few pertinent stats about Leslie Fine and Crowdcast, an uber-geeky business intelligence tool that helps decision makers tap into the collective knowledge of employees.

In other words: No one person knows the future, but all of us together might.

Who: Leslie Fine

What: Chief Scientist, Crowdcast

Why: Crowdcast blends ex-Caltech statistical analysis chops with a simple wagering interface to create a game played among employees. At its most basic, it provides a way for businesses to download all the experience and knowledge possessed by their employees about an arena or pending decision.

Where: crowdcast.com (Web site); @lesliefine (Twitter); San Francisco (analog place)

Who else: Inkling also provides predictive tools, but isn’t as consulting-oriented.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in Her Facebook Profile

When Did You Catch the Geek Bug?: When I was at Caltech, my adviser, John Ledyard, was amazing at making very complex analysis problems very folksy. He was very good at telling stories.

Has a Geek Crush On: Are dead people okay? If so, his name is Leo Hurwicz; he won the Nobel Prize in mechanism design a few years ago.

What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?: I have to grow up?

Wishes There Was an App for: Oh yeah, it’s actually my Plan B. I call it Seat Sniper. You tell it about your seating preferences (window, front, exit row) and in the 72 hours before a flight when seats are moving around, it continually pings the airlines Web site to see if there are any maximizing moves to me made. Then, it does it for you.

Fails At: I’m terrible at delegating, and that’s something I am having to learn here.

Bio in 140 Characters

Wesleyan, then to CalTech. She joined HP Labs; wasn’t ready to retire. Became chief scientist for Crowdcast, so she could tell the future.

The Five Questions

Crowdcast seems super technical. Break it down for us.

Crowdcast is an enterprise software platform that helps companies make better forecasts by tapping the knowledge stored in their employees. People you hire are the best informed to help businesses understand their own targets. For lack of a better term, we ask them to place bets on things that we then tie back to real incentives when bets are made accurately. The software plays like a stock market or betting game. It is like duck on a pond. It seems simple on top, but underneath there are lots of moving parts at work.

What kinds of questions is Crowdcast good at answering?

We spent a lot of time in our first year as a new company debating that because prediction markets can, in theory, solve any kind of problem. Where we’ve seen the most traction are in a couple areas.

Questions whose outcomes will be knowable in three months to a year and where there is very dispersed knowledge in your organization tend to do well. An example would be bringing a new product to market, where there are many silos involved and lots of funky incentives. We nail questions like, “When will it [a new product] come out?” and “How good will it be?” and “How much will it cost to do so?”

How do you handle outliers? They might be telling you something you need to know, and they might just be way off.

Yeah, that’s a good question. We pay close attention to game players whose predictions are one standard deviation or more away from the average guess. They get a little light box pop-up that asks them why they’ve bid that way, so that we can gather any potential special intelligence.

What’s your ah-ha technology moment, when you realized you were living in the future?

We had this little app at HP Labs called Zoomgraph–this is in 2000–where you could look at all the data flows in your computer.

There’s like a million free Facebook apps that do that today, but, in 2000, it was showing back to me, on a screen, a map of my world. It was very navel-gazing, which we did a lot of at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) Labs. It was amazing in a passive way.

You work on developing games intended to tell the future. Are you competitive about this stuff?

Ha ha. Yeah, we use our product internally to predict all kinds of stuff–some business related, some just fun. I’m very competitive with it. We keep track of points here and I think I’m 4x above the nearest competitor. I bought most of my Christmas presents with Amazon (AMZN) gift cards I won that way.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: Ethan Beard of Facebook

Drake Martinet — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:48:19 +0000

In a feature of “Almost Famous” that we’ve dubbed “Need to Know,” All Things Digital talks with top players inside tech companies–much as we talk to emerging entrepreneurs–who are perhaps not as prominent as their influence suggests, but who should be.

This week: We friended Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook Developer Network, and had a sit-down with him at the social networking company’s Silicon Valley HQ to talk about–of course–the importance of platforms.

Who: Ethan Beard

What: Director of the Facebook Developer Network

Why: After stints in investment banking, Viacom (VIA) music service MTV Networks and most recently, Google (GOOG), Ethan made the move to Facebook almost two years ago.

Where: Facebook Developer Blog (Web site); @ethanbeard (Twitter); Palo Alto, Calif. (analog place)

Who Else: Everyone has been trying to spread social graphs deeper into the Web, but Facebook dominates.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Worst Job: I worked one summer for the United States Postal Service, sorting mail at a post office in Bangor, Maine. Yeah, that was pretty bad. Basically, it was just endless piles of mail that you had to sort into different little holes. And you’d have, like, your timed break, 10 minutes every couple of hours or something. You’d deal with these unionized people who’d been working at the post office forever, who would smoke cigarettes and play cribbage during their 10 minutes and then back to sorting.

Has a Geek Crush on: In the tech world, I’m a big fan of Alan Kay, both because he’s super geeky and super thoughtful.

Gadget of the Moment: Well, when I was at Google, I worked a lot with early Android stuff, so I’m very intrigued by the Nexus One. I’d like to get my hands on one, but haven’t yet.

What Do You Hope the Upcoming magic Apple (AAPL) Tablet Will Do?: Respond to my emails. Or at least delete some of them.

Fails At: I’m a miserable snowboarder. That’s not a good answer though. My wife would say that I never seem to stop working.

Bio in 140 Characters

Hails from Winterport, Maine. Got schooled at Wharton and NYU. He did time at an investment bank. Left for MTV, Google and now Facebook.

The Five Questions

We’ve heard “It’s not just a Web site, it’s a platform” before. What is Facebook offering today that sets it apart?

The Facebook platform is actually very different than many platforms that have come in the past. The app platform is actually a lot more like standard platforms. It’s a development environment with lots of different UI elements you can integrate and build this experience. But really, what we’ve done with Facebook Connect is change Facebook platform to make it cross-platform.

Facebook platform is on Facebook.com, but it’s on lots of other Web sites: It’s on mobile devices; we’re pushing into gaming consoles. It’s less about a place you can build an application and more about features and functions you can add to any platform. We want to give users the tools and technology that allow them to connect with anything they care about, anywhere they are.

What industries haven’t caught on yet, or could be using social connection tools much better than they are today?

I’d point to two things. I think the media consumption space is changing very rapidly, like the TV industry is changing very rapidly. I mean, NBC is being sold not for NBC, but for all the cable assets in it. The printed news businesses is just being turned on its ear. I think there are some really great opportunities for layering in the social graph that could affect consumption habits. It can bring a different lens to what is news. Also, I’d love to be able to go to Pandora and see the stations my friends are listening to. I have some specific friends who are great at picking music. What we want to do with Facebook platform is tie those two together, so I can connect with that friend who always picks great music.

I think the DVR is a good example [of the possibilities]. I would like to be able to see what my friends are watching and interact with them based on that.

Yeah, let’s talk music for a second. I looked at your Facebook profile and saw all these bands and said to myself, “Either this guy has a music-savvy intern in his office who went to college in the 2000s and made this profile for him or he is a legit music fan.” Which is it?

I’m a big fan of music. A huge fan. I don’t really remember what’s on there. Probably Radiohead, the Decembrists, the Killers, maybe Sufjan Stevens. I like to stay current. I just bought a Sonos music player. I love having it all at my fingertips, with a little touchscreen.

Lots of big-time geeks have some strong memories of early experiences with technology. Do you have an “ah-ha” tech moment like that?

Yeah, sure, absolutely. So, when I went to college–this is a couple of decades ago now, pre-Web–my father, who worked at a university, gave me a 1200-baud modem when no one had modems. You’re probably going to read some deep-rooted psychology into this, but he was like, “This is how we’re going to communicate–we’re obviously not going to see each other and don’t expect me to talk on the phone with you. You should be sending me email.” And so, in 1990, I had this modem, and there wasn’t anything you could do with it except like log on to university computers.

There was Telnet and FTP. I didn’t need to go to the lab. I could log into Michigan’s computer from right here in my dorm room at two o’clock in the morning, which is what I tended to do. I’d log on and try to download some random shareware at two in the morning at 1200 baud, which basically meant leaving your computer on overnight, getting up in the morning, seeing that it had failed and trying again.

You’ve seen all kinds of arenas tap into the social space. What has been the sleeper hit for Facebook?

I’m gonna say the games. They didn’t catch us by surprise, but their size, success and the success of the gaming companies wasn’t something that we all saw coming. That was one that, in retrospect, makes a lot of sense, but wasn’t one that we all saw coming. Currently, I’m addicted to Bejeweled. It’s like crack on the iPhone, it’s 60 seconds long, and you’ll look at the score and realize that your mom has a higher score than you. Its not like FarmVille, where you can just say to yourself, “Well, she just has more time to farm.” It’s the same 60 seconds, so its just about how good you are.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: Harold Smith IV of OWLE

Drake Martinet — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:59:21 +0000

A feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We we had a Skype visit with, asked some questions of and gathered a few pertinent stats about Harold Smith IV and OWLE: Optical Widget for Life Enhancement, a superbeefy accessory for the Apple (AAPL) iPhone that attempts to bridge the gap between a camera on a phone and professional camcorder.

Who: Harold Smith IV

What: CEO and co-founder

Why: After early prototypes and iPhoneDevCamp, Harold patented a product that uses off-the-shelf lenses and microphones coupled with nearly a pound of custom-machined aluminum to stabilize and supercharge videos taken by iPhones. Harold and his team just finished churning out the first 500 OWLE Bubos (Bubo is the model name), which shipped at the end of 2009.

Where: wantowle.com (Web site); @wantowle (Twitter); Scottsdale, Ariz. (analog place)

Who else: A Japanese company called Factron makes a case, called Quattro, with detachable lenses, although similarities are thin. The OWLE is a one-of-a-kind product at this point, but Harold sees competition on the horizon as video apps improve.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job: I worked at Taste of Chicago, a hot dog shop. I guess it was my first experience in the truth of what goes on behind the scenes at a restaurant. This one day, I spilled a bucket of diced tomatoes on the floor, and my manager just kicked them back into the bucket and put it back on the counter. I didn’t last very long.

Has a Geek Crush On: Jim Jannard, he founded Red, the digital cinema camera company. Basically, he just saw a need and a product that didn’t exist yet and he just made it. That’s basically what we are trying to do.

Gadget of the Moment: You are gonna laugh because it’s so simple. I got this iPhone battery from Tumi for Christmas. It’s great. It holds five full charges and recharges the phone in two hours.

Wishes There Was an App For: Well, I really want to have more control over iPhone video. There’s no reason why we can’t have control over white balance, selective focus and everything. I mean, it’s all digital, and we have the tools. Truthfully though, I’d really love to play Halo on my iPhone in augmented reality. That’s coming.

Fails At: Spelling and grammar. I rely on the Internet to fix my mistakes. I think it would be the greatest prank ever to turn off all the spelling and grammar check in the world for one day to see how we all really type.

Bio in 140 Characters

Split his early years between Scottsdale and San Francisco. Couldn’t decide on a college major. Sold software, sold vitamins, invented OWLE.

The Five Questions

Give us the short history of how you decided the iPhone needed to be better at shooting video.

It all started with my day job at Natural Partners, a vitamin distribution company. They wanted to use video to reach customers in a way that competitors weren’t, so they started doing a Web TV show. We got into broadcasting trade shows live and wanted a mobile camera. The Nokia (NOK) N95 had just come out and Qik [online mobile streaming service] was around. I ended up building a rig to make live broadcasting with the N95 better. It just looked awful, all brackets and tape. When the iPhone came out, it was so thin and nice, I wanted to build something nice for it. That was the first OWLE prototype.

What exactly is the OWLE now?

Well, the OWLE Bubo is the current model. It is a custom-machined piece of billet aluminum, anodized black. We tried a lot of different sizes, and we settled on a version that weighs 0.9 pounds. You want it to be heavy enough so that you get stability without being a pain to carry around. The second component is the lens that it comes with. The body itself has 37-millimeter threading, the largest standard when it comes to camcorder lenses. These are things you can get at Best Buy (BBY) as add-ons for your camcorder. The lens even comes in two parts, and the first stage can be used alone for close-up shots. It also has an add-on microphone from Vericorder, so that you can hear what’s going on in front of the phone while it’s in the OWLE. You get the whole thing for $129.99.

Where do you hope people will be seeing these for sale in the future?

Well, we just launched a new Web site last week, and we are already filling orders from that. Right now, we are based out of a distribution center in Scottsdale, so we are filling orders ourselves today, but we could ramp up very quickly to larger order fulfillment. In my last job, I was running a $6-million-a-year e-commerce site, so when we are ready to ramp up, that’s my world, I’m ready for that.

We just struck a deal with ThinkGeek.com, so you can buy an OWLE there right now. Nothing is official yet, but we are currently in talks with Apple about selling OWLEs in Apple stores. That would be the dream location, I guess.

Picard or Kirk?

Picard for sure, I mean that’s what I grew up on–that was the touchscreen stuff. That was my first real exposure to touchscreens and HD video. It wasn’t shot in HD or anything, but Captain Picard would stand there, and there was that huge screen in full quality with a Klingon on it or something. We were there watching it on our little CRT televisions. That was the future. That’s what I thought when I first got an iPhone. I mean, it was a tricorder, that was “Star Trek.” I’m still waiting for my transporter.

What’s the OWLE story that beats them all?

Well, we just got this video from our marketing team–I’m not sure we’re going to release it. It’s basically of the team taking an OWLE Bubo with an iPhone inside and throwing it off a building like five times. The iPhone was, like, totally fine, but we don’t want to endorse people chucking their iPhones like that.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: Michael Gregory of Auto-Tune the News

Drake Martinet — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 07:25:19 +0000

A feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We went all the way to Brooklyn to visit with, ask some questions of and gather a few pertinent stats about Michael Gregory and Auto-Tune the News, the viral video series featuring mainstream news personalities and hip-hop style singing.

Who: Michael Gregory

What: VP of Counter Melodies, Gregory Residence Productions

Why: In April 2009, the Gregory brothers began producing Auto-Tune the News, a musical satire of news programming using the ubiquitous Auto-Tune production software that enables spoken words to sound like singing (among other things). Every Auto-tune the News episode (nine so far) has gone viral, logging nearly 12 million views overall.

Where: thegregorybrothers.com (Web site); Brooklyn, NY (analog place).

Who else: Anyone with a Flip cam, a family of musical production wonks and 100 man-hours per episode.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job: I moved furniture for a while. I got a little too excited and strained my back.

Has a Geek Crush on: Charlie Chaplin. He was an actor, he was technically proficient–he could do everything. And Groucho Marx. He was the Picasso of 20th-century comedy.

Gadget of the Moment: I think we may need to get ourselves a new camera this year. [But] we don’t want to improve production value too much, you know, and get people’s hopes up.

Wishes There Was an App For: One that turns your phone into a Taser. Not that I’ve ever been physically harmed or anything. I just think it would be cool.

Spoiler Alert: The next Auto-Tune the News will be more rock-oriented and has something to do with turtles. We can’t say more.

A Taste of Auto-Tune the News

Bio in 140 Characters

Born & raised in Appalachia. Moved w/brothers to Brooklyn. Worked days in a recording studio, nights playing w/Auto-Tune. Went viral.

The Five Questions

Give me the step-by-step. How do you Auto-Tune the News?

Sometimes, it just kinda comes together. Normally, we start with the audio track that comes first. We kinda start with the hook and then lay down some kinda creepy arpeggio-sounding things, then lay down a sweet baseline.

It’s usually three or four stories news. Sometimes we’ll just see stories that we know are it. This last one, number 10, I probably watched the most news. Sometimes it’s because the story is boring, but sometimes it’s interesting, but the speaker is boring. It gets easier once you find your heavy hitters [news people who sound good auto-tuned].

What is your secret to making videos that are reliably viral?

I think it’s half crapshoot, half, uh…not crapshoot. No one is an island on the Internet; I’ve heard that said somewhere, maybe by Confucius. The perfect keywords for a viral hit these days are probably something like New Moon-Lady Gaga-Parody-Kanye. Something like that. Put those in all caps in your title and you’ll have a viral hit. Oh, and I forgot, cute cats.

Seriously, if you have things that are already popular in your video, it helps for sure. That’s why our “Charlie Bit Me” video [referring to the viral video of cute British kids] is probably our most viral to date. It took two already popular memes, the “Kanye interruption” [from this year's MTV Video Music Awards] and the “Charlie Bit Me” and remixed them in a style that is currently a meme. It created this, like, infinite feedback loop.

Early on, the strategy was releasing stuff parodying the [presidential] debates on the debate YouTube channel. I hate to admit it, but we used that really stupid but necessary formula of releasing something right after an event ended and titling it, “Kanye-Tiger Woods-Lady Gaga-Kittens.” I didn’t title it in all caps if that makes you feel better about me.

How has YouTube changed the world?

Well, in comedy at least, back in the vaudeville days, it was easy to steal from everyone and just use the material and not get in trouble. Back in those days, people weren’t taping your every move and saying, like, “Oh, you stole that from Sammy the ventriloquist.” Now, YouTube is sort of the new vaudeville. People can watch and say, “Oh, you’re stealing that from Steve Carell, and that’s from Andy Samberg, and that’s from Tina Fey.”

How has this turned into a viable business?

So right now, the brothers and me have left other jobs to do this full time. We’re trying to be smart businesswise, which has always been hard for me. I’ve been doing other [production] stuff…freelancing. But I was also doing stuff like tutoring SATs. We get lots of inquiries that we can’t realistically do, like: “Auto-Tune our business conference.” People don’t really understand how much effort it is. We did a video for the Webbies, and we did something for Sony (SNE). Those bring in the bread.

Internet fame is a fickle temptress. What will you do if and when Auto-Tune the News loses popularity?

I think I would just to succumb to my heroin addiction. You know, curl up in a ball and cry–just get it over with. Memes certainly have a beginning and an end. I think the fad will certainly end, but I think what has been created is a new category of what some people call art and some people call a joke. I think it’s possible that, in 20 years, people will still be doing the Auto-Tune joke. It will just be, like, “Meghan McCain sings the debate with Malia Obama.”

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: Flowtown's Ethan Bloch

Drake Martinet — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 17:00:37 +0000

This week: A coffee shop visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Ethan Bloch and Flowtown, software that enables users to enter an email address and get back a rich set of personal info farmed from more than 20 social networks and online services to which they might belong.

Who: Ethan Bloch

What: CEO, Flowtown

Why: Flowtown’s platform uses APIs and partnerships to deliver meaningful customer data to businesses with lists of email leads.

Where: ethanbloch.com (personal website); San Francisco (analog); @ebloch (Twitter)

Who else: Infusionsoft.com

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job: I drove a truck delivering industrial rags to Jiffy Lubes; that was probably the worst. I did work at Best Buy (BBY), but I actually liked that. I was “the closer.” I could get people who came in to get a laptop to leave with that, the service plans and the gold USB cables.

Has a Geek Crush on: Warren Buffett. I have a finance background and I just like his philosophy on life.

Gadget he wants for Christmas: A Kindle. I’m an Amazon (AMZN) fanboy.

Wishes There Was an App For: One that tells you about how much a taxi ride should cost between any two places in a major city. I always feel like I’m getting ripped off.

Freely Admits: He owns an AK-47 (a legal one).

Bio in 140 Characters

Ethan recently moved to SF, after finishing a finance degree at University of Florida. Flowtown is his first Silicon Valley venture.

The Five Questions

What problem are you solving?

Essentially, we are a platform to help businesses connect with their customers everywhere in the social Web. Starting with an email address, we can tell you who a person is [including] name, age, gender, occupation, location, and what social networks they are on. Then, we give [businesses] tools to go and interact with that person.

The problem that we are solving is that for a decade, businesses have been collecting email addresses but don’t know how to leverage them in the social Web. We help create those connections and let businesses have personal conversations with their customers.

How does a business have 10,000 personal conversations?

That’s the big problem we are going after. Right now, [the answer] is turning an email address into a social connection. Then you can start a conversation. The bigger issue is how you stay relevant to 10,000 people; whether you are a personal brand or Procter & Gamble (PG).

This sounds a little creepy. What does Flowtown know about me?

[Ethan enters three of my email addresses into the interface.]

Well, It looks like your given name is Edward, you are male, and live in San Diego, although that may be a little out of date. I’ve got a short resume here courtesy of LinkedIn that puts you currently in a Masters program at Stanford [University] and as an Intern at AllThingsD. It looks like you’ve got a couple Flickr accounts, a LinkedIn profile, Facebook; your Twitter handle is @withdrake, you subscribe to several newspapers online, have WordPress and Pandora accounts and are a member of Match.com [busted!].

Wow, that was almost scary good. Where are you harvesting this?

This is all APIs, except in the case of Facebook and LinkedIn. We show up to five social networks, along with Amazon. We search Facebook, by way of a partner. We get more data than that [as seen in the search we just ran], but we are unsure how far down we want to go as far as the individual user. We don’t want to get too “stalkerish.” We could tell businesses who an individual is based on their occupation, age, location, etc. We do show that in the aggregate, but currently won’t display it at the individual level.

What was the drive to get into this business?

Well, for both Dan Martell [co-founder] and I, it’s really about serving small businesses. In the late ’90s, my dad owned a small business and wanted to use the Internet to generate more business. He got sold on this online marketing package, this video, and really got taken advantage of.

Ever since then I’ve really been passionate about building products that really ad value to businesses and that really let you see the results you are getting. That’s really my North Star.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: Sprout's Matthew McNeely

Drake Martinet — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 02:17:16 +0000

A feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: A virtual visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Matthew McNeely and Sprout, the build-it-yourself Flash tool that lets anyone create customized Web site widgets.

Who: Matthew McNeely

What: VP of Engineering, Sprout.

Why: Sprout is a Web-based, WYSIWYG Flash editor that allows individuals and businesses to build customized content that can be embedded on their own sites. Sprout’s creations (known as “sprouts”) are also frequently incorporated into social media campaigns.

Where: Sproutinc.com (corporate bio); San Francisco, although Matthew says the team is “truly distributed,” as he lives in New Hampshire (analog); Facebook Fan Page (Yes, you can write on its wall); @Sprout (Twitter).

Who else: Slide; SlideRocket. But, “not too many that focus on branding the way we do.”

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job: I grew up in Indiana, and, in the summers, I would de-tassel corn.

Has a Geek Crush on: I’m gonna get letters from all my Apple (AAPL) friends for saying this: Bill Gates of Microsoft (MSFT).

Gadget of the Moment: I finally got an iPhone, but I got it for $50, refurb.

Tech Wish: I wish I could build a sprout for my iPhone, but that means it would need to run Flash.

Fails at: I’m not a very good communicator, and every once in a while I catch myself closing up and not communicating with the [Sprout] team the way I need to.

Bio in 140 Characters

Shares a hometown w/James Dean. Picked corn until he got his first computer. Was a software engineer/consultant before moving to Sprout.

The Five Questions

What does Sprout bring to the table that others don’t?

At the most basic level, it’s about the speed. Before Sprout, you really needed to understand Flash and the sort of movie metaphor that it puts out in order to use it. Now, it’s much faster. If you know PowerPoint, you can use our product.

We also have a big push in the social networking space. That’s unique to us. If you are looking to put out a really rich media campaign on a social network, there’s no better service. You can also change things on the fly. Someone in the ad department can say, “Hey, this ad isn’t working.” And you can change it in five minutes, and it’s back up.

Who isn’t using Sprout, but should?

I can think of two examples. One would be, say, a yoga instructor who was also tech savvy. She could build up a quick shell of a Web presence with Sprout and sell it to other yogis who just want to give classes, but still have a nice, clean, updated Web site.

The second thing would be a porn sprout. That’s one industry that could really benefit from our technology, but just hasn’t yet. I mean, imagine, video clips and little libraries. We’ve seen some slightly suggestive things come across the bow, but no one has really gone all the way yet. I really hope you print that.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: A Sprout spokesman wanted to make sure readers knew that McNeely was kidding here, of course. Sprout's terms of service forbid such a use of its technology.]

Is there a formula for an attention-grabbing Sprout widget?

It’s different in every industry. Overall, a little animation and really good-looking graphics help. But, when it comes to engagement, we do have some idea.

It has to be contextually relevant [in the social media space], your friends should be fans of this Facebook page [for it to become popular], stuff like that. I mean, with good design, you can get someone like this guy from Des Moines who has basically cornered the market on real estate widgets.

Who should buy Sprout?

You mean besides Google? Seriously, though, we do work with Google (GOOG) quite a bit, and I’d love to see us become the small- to medium-size business ad-building tool for them.

Most real geeks have memories where they saw something new and said to themselves, “Dang, I love living in the future.” What’s yours?

My brother and I got this old North Star computer at this garage sale or something, and I programmed through the night to get this thing to predict, you know, randomize lottery numbers. I never won anything, of course, but I was just so enamored by it.

That kinda got me hooked into the notion that you can work on something and lose yourself in it.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: Savings.com's Loren Bendele

Drake Martinet — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:43:01 +0000

A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: A lunch date with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Loren Bendele and his deal-finding social network, Savings.com, just in time for the holiday shopping wars!

Who: Loren Bendele

What: CEO of Savings.com.

Why: Savings.com combines a Web 1.0-style coupon site with social networking and crowd sourcing to create live lists of discounts offered by over 4,000 major online retailers.

And, gasp, the site is profitable.

Where: Savings.com/about (corporate bio); Santa Monica, Calif. (analog place); No Twitter profile (egads!).

Who else: couponcabin.com, retailmenot.com.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job: Bag boy at a Tom Thumb supermarket outside Dallas, Texas. “I was good though. I always got awards for being the fastest.”

Has a Business Crush on: Yelp.

Gadget of the Moment: iPhone from Apple (AAPL). “I love the Flight Tracker app. It’s a game–all about control.”

Wishes There Was an App for: “I know exactly what I want: A simple app where I can assign levels of importance to contacts. The app would remind me when I haven’t called them in a while. Like, some people I want to call once a week, or a month or a quarter. Just something that helps me keep up relationships.”

Fails at: Details. “I hire others who are much better at that.”

Bio in 140 Characters

Born outside of Dallas, TX. Chem Eng @Texas A&M. Dow Chemical, then to Teleflora, via consulting firms. Became CEO of Savings.com in 2007.

The Five Questions

Isn’t your model a little too “Pets.com, Web 1.0 bubble” to work?

It is sort of Web 1.0. But really, it’s a social network connecting deal fanatics. So, connecting people who are passionate and knowledgeable about getting great deals.

Some people engage at a very deep level with their own blogs and interaction. We call them our “deal pros.” You can also just come to the site and see what deals are being [rated as the best] by those deal pros. It’s based on votes of the people in the community.

What is this I hear about you being profitable? Don’t you know the start-up rules?

Well, our revenue model was important from the start. We make money because we partner with the retailers whose deals show up on our site. When someone sees a deal on our site, they click the link and go to [for instance] the Gap (GPS) Web site and buy something, we get paid.

We have relationships with 4,000 plus merchants–all of the top online merchants, and when a deal gets uploaded to our site [by a deal pro] we attach a tracking ID to that deal and report it to the merchant. I’m driving over $4 million per month to our top merchants. I’m the top sales driver for a lot of them.

We’ve been profitable since September 2007.

What is the single biggest immediate growth area for Savings.com?

International. We opened a site in England that has been growing like crazy. We had been doing it all from the U.S., with no team over there. You can do a lot remotely, but you can’t make those partner relationships, being face to face, getting the exclusive deals.

You can’t take them out to lunch and make the connections. We’ve just hired a team there full time. We actually hired the guy who was in charge of partner marketing for Amazon (AMZN) in Europe. He was so big on the opportunity that we have, that he left them for us.

What businesses would the world be better off without?

Ugh, I can’t stand predatory online businesses; cashforgold.com or those payday loan places. There are lots of those check-out services where they offer you free magazine subscriptions and it turns out that they start charging you and you don’t find out until a year later.

They tell you they are going to do it, but they do it in tiny print and it’s just dishonest. We get offers to include those sorts of things on our site all the time. It’s just not what we want to do. It’s important to keep the community pure.

When did you get the business bug?

My parents had a popcorn and yogurt shop, so they could buy things wholesale. When I was in fifth grade, I guess, I started selling Blow Pops out of my backpack. Remember those things? I could buy them for like seven cents apiece and sell them for 50 cents.

I made a lot of money doing that until the teachers shut me down.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous: Elemental Technologies' Sam Blackman

Drake Martinet — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:01:48 +0000

A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We caught up with Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental Technologies at the San Francisco NewTeeVee Live conference.

Elemental Technologies hopes to become a major player in the future of online and over-the-air video through its high-performance encoding technology.

Who: Sam Blackman

What: CEO and Chairman of Elemental Technologies.

Why: People want to watch live video on all their devices. Making a new version of a given video for every device is time- and processor-intensive. Elemental says it can replace up to five existing dedicated servers with one of its own, based on its proprietary software.

Where: @elementaltech (Twitter); company blog; Portland (analog place).

Who else: Sam says, “We’re the first-ever company to take advantage of GPUs for video processing,” but Nvidia (NVDA) is the key hardware player.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job: Barista. Late for the Trolley coffee. It had this really abusive owner. He’d yell at us if we gave a half-pump too much flavoring.

Gadget of the Moment: Lenovo X301. It’s all about the keyboard.

Early Geek Influence: Jack Dudman. He was a neighbor growing up and was Steve Jobs’s math teacher at Reed College.

Wishes There Was an App for That: A really smart public transit app. Like one that knows where I am and can tell me which of the options near me I can go to, to get to my destination fastest.

Sport You Can’t Live Without: Ultimate Frisbee

Bio in 140 Characters

Raised in Oregon. EE at Brown. Time at Intel, then Pixelworks. Left to start Elemental Technologies. Loves work, kids and Ultimate Frisbee.

The Five Questions

Elemental’s products seem pretty hardcore geeky. Break it down for me.

The man on the street today wants to view video on any device at any time. The content owners of that video need to be able to format the video differently for each type of device ["transcoding"]. We make that process much cheaper. At the beginning, we saw that there was going to be a huge increase in the amount of video produced out there, but that it was hard to distribute.

Right now it’s really hard [lots of equipment and time] to create, say, 240 versions of every video [so that they can be viewed quickly on an iPhone and in HD on a laptop, for instance]. Four to five regular CPU [central processing unit] servers can be replaced by one of our servers with a GPU [graphical processing unit] and our software. That means far less cost for businesses and many more video options for the consumer.

Device variations are just exploding. How do you see the changing landscape moving your business?

I don’t see the number of video formats decreasing at all. Every company that [produces] a device wants to control delivery to it. No one is going to dominate the cellphone market. It’s just too big. You can get three percent and have a nice business. As long as that is the way the game is played, our products will be very desirable.

Why are you going to be the first software company to acquire an auto body shop?

That’s my dream. The way our product works is, when we take an order, we just submit the hardware request to Dell (DELL). They plug in a GPU. We take the box and add our software.

The funny story is that we wanted a more custom look, so we found this auto body shop in Portland that takes the bezels [rack server face plates], sands them, cleans them, repaints them and sends them back. They look beautiful, like tons of engineering went into it. Dell will do that for you, but its 20 grand, and we’re a start-up. That’s my dream, a company that doesn’t have any employees who drive to work but owns an auto body shop.

Every geek has a memory where they saw something new and had to say to themselves, “Dang, I love living in the future.” What’s yours?

I know exactly what that was. Turtle graphics. My mother put me in a programming class in kindergarten, and there was this thing called LOGO [where you could use computer instructions to make an onscreen turtle draw something]. I had an hour class where I figured out how to draw a square. I went home that night and wrote down on paper a program that would draw the American flag.

My neighbor had an Apple (AAPL) IIc that I used to input that first program. I probably stayed up all night as a six-year-old doing that and that was it for me. What a genius idea. I mean, kids love seeing results, and there were no visual results [from programming] for a long time. LOGO was the first thing where you could spend about an hour and get visual results.

What tech war are you watching most closely?

There’s a battle looming between Intel (INTC) and Nvidia, as Intel releases their own GPU architecture. We’re trying to be really well-positioned to benefit from that arms race of the FLOPS [the processing performance unit].

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Almost Famous Update: Now-Out-of-Beta Brizzly Hires Facebooker and Translates Tweets

Voices — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:00:55 +0000

Brizzly, the Web-based twitter client from Thing Labs, covered in Almost Famous two weeks ago, begins public beta today.

The company, which has been in invitation-only beta for months, riffs on the standard Twitter interface by automatically displaying tweeted images in line with the standard 140 characters and relengthens all those pesky shortened urls.

In addition to opening its “expanded” Twitter interface to the world at large, Brizzly is offering an on-the-fly translation tool (based on Google Translate) for foreign tweets, which it says will help users discover new information and gain context.

AllThingsD.com has learned that besides opening the front door to the public, the innovative start-up just grabbed former FriendFeeder and current Facebooker Ben Darnell for the team. Ben was an early Google (GOOG) employee and worked on the Google Reader team with Thing Labs founders Jason Shellen and Chris Wetherell.

Here are two screenshots–one off Brizzly’s new public beta offering and one of the translation feature:

Almost Famous: Aviary's Israel Derdik

Drake Martinet — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:21:07 +0000

A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: A Skype visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Israel Derdik and his high-flying media suite, Aviary, a Web-based media-editing platform that enables users to alter, save and present their multimedia creations, all in the cloud.

Who: Israel Derdik, or “Iz” to his friends.

What: CTO of Aviary.

Why: Aviary is a Web-based media-manipulation suite comprised of flash-based tools for in-browser image editing, pattern generation, image effects, image markup, screen capture and audio editing. Let’s call it Adobe (ADBE) Lite.

Where: @iz (Twitter); aviary.com/about (corporate bio); Hewlett, New York (analog place).

Who else: Sumopaint, Pixler, Garage Band.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job: Tech Support Intern, Prudential Securities.

Has a Geek Crush on: Gina Trapani, Lifehacker.com.

Gadget of the Moment: Chartbeat app for iPhone.

Wishes There Was an App for: Home automation. “I want to have little touchscreens in every room of the house to control lights, HVAC, alarms, all of it. Basically, I want the touchscreens.”

First Computer: Commodore VIC 20. “My dad brought home a VIC 20 when I was six or seven. We played these little games on it–it had a tape drive. I’ve been hooked ever since.”

Bio in 140 Characters

Born in Brooklyn. CS degree from Brooklyn College. Became an intern at ConEd. Bubble of Web 1.0 burst. Then co-founded Aviary.

The Five Questions

What makes Aviary different from Adobe CS or Garage Band?

Aviary can do lots of things, but there’s nothing to install. It’s flash-based and runs right in your browser. The benefit of running that stuff in the cloud is every time you save it, it saves to our servers, and you can access it from any computer.

We also make it easy to do the basic edits on Aviary. Then, for example, [you could] move the project to Photoshop for more heavy-duty stuff. You can also open other peoples’ works–if they haven’t made them private with a premium account–and see how they did something. We call it “creation on the fly.”

Are users ready for this?

Absolutely. We’re seeing it [cloud computing] more with Gmail; people are moving more of their applications to the Web. I think online image editing is still in its nascent stages, but it’s going to get there. [Aviary is] definitely building for the power user, the top of the pyramid, but it will trickle down.

You just completed a successful round of funding. How will Aviary expand?

Well, we’d love to get into bed with Flickr [Yahoo’s (YHOO) popular image-sharing site]. We can already pull images right from your Flickr account, and very shortly we’ll be able to push images back via their API. Currently, there’s a big hole for video editing and stuff for YouTube.

That’s a really, really tough problem to solve because of the file sizes involved. There is also music creation possibly, as opposed to just looping things together and adding effects.

Every geek has a memory where they saw something new and had to say to themselves, “Dang, I love living in the future.” What’s yours?

I’ll tell you exactly what it is because it really stands out. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Wannado City in Florida. It’s a kids’ amusement park that’s entirely indoors. It looks like a huge city, and the kids can do all the jobs–they can be police officers, and there’s fire trucks going back an forth that the kids can sit in, and there’s a bakery–it’s a really cool place. But what struck me as cool is that they give this bracelet to each person in the family when you walk in, and at any given moment you can walk to a kiosk, swipe your bracelet and see where anyone else in your family is in the building. I assume they are using some kind of RFID tags, but when I saw that I was like, “Wow, that’s really awesome.”

If you could change one thing about the Internet, what would it be?

The worst would have to be bad advice in tech support forums. Sometimes, I go on there, and there is just really bad advice. I look at it and think, “I could do that better.” Incompetence drives me crazy.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Weekend Update 11.07.09–Big Trouble in Little China Edition

Drake Martinet — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:30:07 +0000

Big news often comes in small packages and BoomTown was all over the little moves that meant big stories this week. Kara covered a massive redesign of Microsoft’s MSN homepage that follows the old car-racing-mantra-turned-Web-design ethos: Add power and lightness. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when BoomTown covered the end of the Skype ruckus. All is forgiven, and all it took was a sizable stake in the company and seats on the board. Kara rounded things out by running a quick post about a spankin’ new feature from AllThingsD: Every Friday, the just launched “Almost Famous” will cover interesting start-ups through the eyes of their chief geeks. Kara’s all about geek love.

Digital Daily isn’t usually big into bean-counting, but this week the numbers were where it was happening. The first sales figures came back from Apple’s iPhone launch in China, and the numbers weren’t good. As of pub time for the post, only 5,000 iPhones had been (legitimately) purchased. If the Chinese numbers were a picture of modesty, the App Store’s numbers were parading through Time Square in an orange jumpsuit singing Eddie Grant’s “Electric Avenue.” The two-year-old App store’s epic popularity has pushed its already outsized download numbers past the two-billion mark. Not to be outdone with unprecedented flash, Google (GOOG) violated its own nonrule late in the week and ran a semi-ad on the Google homepage. You say ad, they say synergy, but at the end of the day it was a direct promo for Motorola’s (MOT) new Droid, which runs on Google’s Android platform.

MediaMemo started the week off right with a fresh bite from Apple (AAPL). Peter covered the revamp of Apple TV, which will now be offered for $30 a month. News from News Corp. was no surprise this week, when MediaMemo brought us the story that the media empire (and AllThingsD’s uber-parent company) was doing fine as long as you only pay attention to cable and movies. Broadcast and print? Eh, not so much. Finally, Peter asked a few probing questions of Google CEO Eric Schmidt in regard to his company’s suspicious addition of a “blog” tag attached to some Google News postings. Schmidt speculated, but the ultimate answer wasn’t, as he suggested, because of your mother.

Deep in his Personal Technology bunker, at an undisclosed location somewhere in rural Maryland, Walt got to take a crack at the new Motorola Droid this week, and his response was, well, very positive. He praised the Droid’s exceptional battery life and call clarity, even if the touchscreen wasn’t quite up to the iPhone bar. All in all, he said it was a win for Verizon (VZ) and the Google’s mobile OS.

Mossberg’s Mailbox continues to fill with questions about the speculative Apple tablet. Walt offered some other sage advice about making the Windows 7 switch with 64 bits, and what to do with all that grief over the death of Microsoft’s (MSFT) Outlook Express.

Katie was sweatin’ to the newbies this week, with an energetic review of Fitbit, a wireless fob for tracking calories and exercise stats. The Bluetooth headset-sized clip attaches to your waistband and uploads your activities to the Fitbit Web interface, where you can track how many calories you did or didn’t burn. You can also add water consumed and calories eaten. The Fitbit has been shipping since September, but won’t appear on retail shelves until after the holidays. No word yet on if it will include a “Cheesecake Factory” tab to the interface so as to allow for calorie counts that require exponents.

Like any good gadget lovers, we are all about the small and mighty here at AllThingsD. Stay tuned in with your RSS reader, Twitter feed or the good ol’ homepage. We’ll keep bringing you the little things you need to know.

Almost Famous: Brizzly's Chris Wetherell

Voices — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:05:01 +0000

A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: A video visit with, some questions for and a few pertinent stats about Chris Wetherell and his creation, Brizzly, a Web-based social media reader, one of many in the hot status update arena.

Who: Chris Wetherell

What: VP of Technology, Thing Labs, creator of Brizzly.

Why: Brizzly is a Web-based social media software client, for microblogging sites like Twitter or Facebook, expands attachments automatically and allows users to describe and define the trending topics for all its users to see. It’s in invite-only beta.

Where: @cw (Twitter); massless.org (Wetherell’s personal blog); San Francisco (HQ for Thing Labs and Brizzly)

Who else: TweetDeck, Seesmic, TwitIQ

Five Stats You Won’t Find in his Facebook Profile

Worst Job: Assembly line at Fujitsu, making rack servers

Has a Geek Crush on: Mihai Parparita, Google developer in Boston

Gadget of the Moment: Roku’s digital video box. “It’s got Netflix, You Tube and TV. Damn.”

Wishes There Was an App for: The legal arena. “They need to, like, use a computer.”

Fails at: Anything related to email

Bio in 140 Characters

From Beaverton, Ore. Dropped out of Berkeley. Got hungry as an indie rock drummer. @Google Reader. Left Google, invented Brizzly.

The Five Questions

Why should I care about Brizzly?

It depends on what you’re looking for. If one of the things that interests you is how a large community is experiencing life–I mean really interested in the community and not just the idea of your friends–then Brizzly does that a little more easily than other things. [Brizzly's assets are] no small difference for those who are interested in it.

Why are all Twitter-related logos, including yours, so darn cute?

Yeah, we’re a little cheeky, right? I think it’s probably just because of a pendulum swing. I mean, the last thing [Thing Labs' CEO Jason Shellen] and I worked on was the exact opposite. Google Reader is not cuddly. It’s friendly, but cuddly it isn’t. The other thing is, we were hoping to try what strong branding is like–in terms of anthropomorphic animals. The bear design [was drawn by] both Jason and [Twitter Co-founder] Biz Stone.

What can we expect from Thing Labs and Brizzly three months out?

We will have at least three richer sets of experiences, some of which include entirely different products all connected through our letsbetrends.com API.

Every geek has a memory where they saw something new and had to say to themselves, “Dang, I love living in the future.” What’s yours?

One big one for me was at Google–it was my first day and someone says, “Hey, have they taken you to see the robots yet?” I was like, “Hahaha… No.” They took me to this building where there was a room filled with these Rube Goldbergesque mechanical devices. Large cages with metal bars and wires, culminating in this ball in the center. This girl climbed into the thing. She put her feet in these stirrups and sat in this weird chair, and then this book slides out. The girl started tapping her feet on this base drum pedal and doing this thing with her hands, and then the book slides away [they were scanning the books]. I was like, “What is this?” and they said, “Well, this is Ocean [the internal name for Google Books].” What struck me was the scale. It was clear to me that they were going to scan ridiculous amounts of information very, very quickly, and I realized: Whoa, THIS is very different.”

Are you really competitive with rivals?

I just don’t have that kind of fight in me. I mean, I want to kick my own ass. I know there are lots of guys out there who can totally drop the names of someone they want to just crush. I just don’t have it. I get more frustrated with me, more than anyone else. I’m like Jim Carrey in “Liar Liar”: “I’m kicking my ass.”

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Meet Drake Meeting Brizzly: A Spanking New ATD Feature

Kara Swisher — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:03:48 +0000

Today, All Things Digital debuts a new feature called “Almost Famous” in our Voices section.

No, it is not about Kate Hudson and nascent rock stars.

Well, you might meet geek rock stars to be.

Focused on innovative, interesting or just plain odd start-ups, we thought it was a good way for ATD readers to get a gander at some up-and-coming ideas and trends.

We cover start-ups, of course, on the site, but–given that we have a small staff that breaks a lot of big-company news–not on a regular time frame.

So, while we are no good at predicting what will work and what will not and who will make it and who will fail, every Friday, Drake Martinet will be paying a video interview visit with, asking some questions of and gleaning a few pertinent stats about a wide range of companies.

Here’s our first effort: Chris Wetherell, creator of Brizzly, a Web-based social media reader.

The San Francisco start-up, which just rolled out support for Twitter lists last night, is also just wrapping up a new $600,000 round of funding, according to Jason Shellen, CEO of Thing Labs, from which Brizzly sprang.

Brizzly had already raised $1.5 million from Polaris Venture Partners last year. Now it is getting more cash from investors such as Ron Conway to further its software and other efforts.

But don’t rely on BoomTown for info about Brizzly–check out Drake’s take.